Details of Microsoft’s online service
Office Live is now live – at least as a beta. You can go to officelive.com and to get started you have to enter a proposed domain name and click on ‘Go’ – however you won’t get very far unless you have a ‘Product Key’ and those keys are only available to a limited number of beta testers.
At this stage Office Live is a series of collaboration or web hosting tools. They are interesting but if you thought that you’d get an online version of Word or Excel – think again.
Office Live Basics
– is ‘free’ (advertising supported) web hosting, similar to that offered by other companies for many years. It has your own domain name, 30MB disk space, 5 email accounts (2GB storage on each). What makes ‘Basics’ different is the drag n drop design tools online (you don’t need FrontPage) plus reports on the traffic to your site.
Office Live Essentials
– costs $29.95 during the beta. It is an enhanced version of the Basics offering with 50 email accounts, more traffic reports and search engine reports. It also includes some ‘in house’ web based features for managing staff, assets, documents and customers.
Office Live Collaboration
– also costs $29.95 and is the option that we think is the most compelling for small businesses. It is essentially a hosted version of Sharepoint with password protected sub-sites to let you share information with your staff and associates. There are areas available for employee, customer, project, sales and marketing services. The initial price is for up to 10 employees, you can get access for more customers at the rate of $11.95 per month for another 5 employees.
While most companies have a web site, we’re big fans of the concept of sharing information via private web sites. It’s better than just having emails flying around but it can be hard to deploy and get people accustomed to using it. Having a hosted and more focused service should help business take advantage of this without the hassles of installing and managing themselves.
The basic requirements for using Office Live are quite simple however you should note the feature specific requirements to avoid disappointment:
” To use Office Live Collaboration, you need the following:
* Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 4 (SP4) or later running on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003
* Internet access via dial-up or broadband
* Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution display
* Certain features require Microsoft Office 2000 or higher
The following system requirements apply to specific features:
* To use the Edit in Datasheet feature within the Business Applications and Shared Sites areas requires Microsoft Office 2003.
* To export to Business Contact Manager requires Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office XP, or Microsoft Office 2000.
* To import contacts from Microsoft Office Outlook requires Microsoft Office 2003 or Microsoft Office XP.
* To link contacts to Microsoft Office Outlook requires Microsoft Office 2003. “
